The Cult of Process

we can't govern
Aug 28, 2017 · 7 min read

I’ve written about West Wing liberals before. I probably will again. They’re a persistent problem: a generation’s minds poisoned by Sorkin’s tepid paean to professionalism, a whole class of politically engaged young people taught to regard politics as “the art of the possible” rather than the acquisition and exercise of power. It’s a problem, possibly the problem today: Donald Trump is in office chiefly because of a precipitous decline of trust in government, and that can be laid at the feet of the technocrats and lanyard-wearers in DC. I don’t think it’s the fault of The West Wing, really. That’s a symptom, but it’s an instructive one, as it clearly lays out the governing philosophy of this particular cadre. From there you can draw a straight line through the spineless incrementalism of the Obama years, the bungled response to the financial crisis, and the eventual rise of Trump.

“don’t look at me, i’m just an administrator”

Basically, West Wing Liberalism is a form of liberalism that lionizes and venerates the Process above all. It is a sort of cargo-cult politics, focusing on the trappings of state: the meetings, the experts, the sober discussions, the high-minded appeals to bipartisanship and civility. It is the ultimate triumph of form over function, which makes it ideally suited for the upper-class bobos that form the core of the political set in the 21st century. The chief tenet of WWL is that the important thing is a fair process. Any outcome produced by a fair process, by serious-minded discussion between educated peers, is necessarily just. Not only that — it is manifestly, definitionally just, and thus this is what a just world looks like. The hunger, the poverty, the misery and death that blossoms throughout the world and, increasingly, at home? That’s just part of the cost of doing business. It is fair, because it was done the right way.

In this theory, politicians are skilled laborers, managers of a sort: an election is an extended job interview, where candidates compete to demonstrate that they best have the skills to steer the ship of state. Any suggestion that the ship is radically off course is met with scorn; clearly this person is Unserious, the greatest sin. Hence the bafflingly tone-deaf Clinton campaign, touting her as the “most qualified candidate ever.” That’s how you approach a job interview. That’s now how you convince a nation of 300 million desperate, fearful, optimistic, angry, impatient and hopeful Americans to make you their leader. Clinton never presented any kind of vision. We got no sense of what her America would be like, except “like now, but better.” Her policies all involved tinkering around the edges, tweaking this, fixing that, but without any sense that it was leading towards a grand unified theory of what America was, and what it was to be.

West Wing Liberals do not see power. They see us as living in the final, perfected state of humanity: the End of History, as envisioned by Fukuyama. This is what it was all leading up to, and this is where we will dwell in perpetuity, in our ivory city with its vaulted spires of learning and its great plazas of intellectual discourse. We don’t need to build any new buildings or tear down any old ones. Just repair things when they break, keep the lights on and the water flowing. The President here is the national building manager, someone you call when your toilet won’t flush or your roof leaks. The idea that large swathes of this country are so immiserated, so furious as to want to tear the city down does not occur to the WWL.

Trump, by contrast, sensed that anger. Conservatives always do. They see power. They have a vision. It is a horrifying vision: a corporate dystopia where a tiny fraction of the feudal elite control vast wealth, where the poor suffer and die quickly and quietly in their decaying outposts or crushed in the machinery of capital. They’re good at presenting this as something else — a return to traditional values and culture, the white man ascendant once again — but they still fundamentally understand that lots of people in this country want something other than what they’re getting. They sense, in a disarticulate way, that things are not right: the stars are out of alignment, the tectonic plates shift beneath their feet, their skin burns and peels in the harsh buzz of the fluorescent lights. They may dare to hope that things can be made better for everyone, but if that’s not on the menu, they’ll flock to the party that says that things can be made better for just them. To hell with the outcasts and foreigners who must suffer to make it so. They’d do the same to me. The GOP attracts voters by offering not quite enough lifeboats, but compared to the Democrats’ insistence that the voyage is on track, you can’t blame voters for taking a chance.

The West Wing Liberals stand in the way of progress. They always have and always will. Progress, after all, is change. Deviation from the perfect order! It is the ultimate sin. At the core of this is the WWL inability to ever place a value judgment on anything. Nothing can be Good, or Evil. Those concepts do not exist in politics. Worse: they are the fantasies of a child. A naif, one who doesn’t know how this town works. Things can be Efficient, or Inefficient; they can be Correct, or Incorrect (that is, fundamentally corresponding to a objective underlying reality or not, WWLs are inveterate positivists); they can be Right, the product of thoughtful consensus, or Wrong, the product of disordered thinking. But when an aspirin factory is bombed or a US citizen is remotely annihilated by drone attack, these things are not evil. They are merely regrettable. When millions suffer and perish as life-saving medicine sits on shelves, that is the market at work. When the police murder and defame black men in the streets, it is not a sign of a fundamental rot, but a lack of proper training, to be fixed via sensitivity class and body cameras. Things that are Good are features. Things that are Bad are bugs. One more round of debugging, and we’ll have optimized America’s code.

The Left is dangerous to the liberals because we dare to tell them that their perfect city is a garbage pit. The conservatives have been saying that for years, but they are easily dismissed; clearly, they just want to tear down the progress we’ve made, roll back America to a previous build, and create their own utopia. They are wrong, but they’re not evil, just tragically misinformed. The Left, by contrast, cannot be dismissed as revanchists (though some of the more vacuous liberals — Al Giordano, Imani Gandy, etc. will try). Instead, they are crazy. They are dangerous. Anarchists! Liberals always show their true colors here. They worship the system, the process, and so any hint that the evils they decry might be inevitable consequences of an unjust system will be met with hellfire. They will always protect their own comfort, the system that has propped them up, even as they decry its consequences. The most “woke” among them, the crusaders for dignity and equality, are hamstrung by their faith in the process that has worked for them, even as they see it fail everyone else. When the chips are down, they will vote in their own self-interest and work to undermine the Left.

We are rapidly reaching a point where even the most strident defenders of the liberal world order can see that there is something terribly wrong, a yawning gulf that cannot be papered over. They pine for more innocent days without seeing their own role in the current catastrophe and the catastrophes to come. We see this in the lionization of the senile vacuity of Reagan, the sleazy triangulation of Clinton, the bloodsoaked insanity of Bush and the sleek corporatism of Obama. Liberals who correctly identified Bush as a psychotic war criminal now praise his “resistance” to Trump and speak about his term as though it was a halcyon era, an oasis of calm where the professional political class acted with measured foresight and appropriate decorum. Never mind his bizarre Christian Dominionism, never mind that he turned the Middle East into a vortex of gore, never mind the petty cruelty and spite of his batshit coterie. He was a Statesman.

Kafka said “in the fight between you and the world, bet on the world.” Reality always wins. The reality is that the idea of the technocratic manager-politician is dead, smashed on the rocks of reactionary fascism. That our current President is debatably the dumbest man alive should be a stake in the heart of the election-as-job-interview paradigm. The question is where do we go from here. Some liberals will withdraw into solipsism and self-regard, managing their little kingdoms according to their concept of order. Some will reveal their true colors and march with the forces of fascism in defense of their property and status. Some, though — maybe even most — can be shown that there is another way, that the better world that they always wanted is still possible if they’re willing to get their hands dirty. They spoke in lofty platitudes for a long, long time, promising that their way would bring us paradise. Time for them to put their money where their mouth was. If you really want to make a better world, join us, and try.

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